Another Tory leader bites the dust
If anyone doubts that Canadian conservatives have become their own worst enemy, let them cast their eyes to Alberta where Premier Jason Kenney has just tendered his humiliating resignation. It wasn’t the province’s Opposition New Democrats who drove him out of office. It was his own United Conservative Party — the party he co-founded — that effectively pulled the plug on the premier’s political life-support system on Wednesday. Unable to quell a caucus revolt that has raged for months, Kenney had to submit to a leadership review. And when only 51.4 per cent of the party members who voted in that review wanted him to stay put, his position became untenable.
If a divided conservative party colliding with an unpopular conservative leader were only an Alberta thing, the rest of the country might gape at this western train wreck, cringe and then move on. But Kenney’s demise comes just months after the Conservative Party of Canada ousted Erin O’Toole and became embroiled in a bitter race to replace him. It also comes during an Ontario election campaign in which a new conservative party is running against the old PC Party it has long since rejected. Turns out there are a lot of unhappy campers in the country’s conservative tents, no matter how big, blue and accommodating some party faithful hope to make it.
Kenney’s political demise shows how fraught and thankless that job can be. After a sizable contingent split from Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives to form the Wildrose Party, Kenney left federal politics, where he had served as a cabinet minister in Stephen Harper’s government, with the mission of reuniting the province’s right. That was in 2016. At first he succeeded and, at the helm of the newly minted United Conservative Party, swept into office with a landslide election victory three years later. The deep divisions between the party’s right and centrist wings as well as between its rural and urban constituencies, however, remained. When COVID-19 hit, it drove those fissures further apart. Kenney’s response to the pandemic seemed to offend everyone in the party — not just the right-wing members of the legislative assembly who complained his measures went too far, but also the more centrist MLAs who insisted they didn’t go far enough.
To be sure, other factors contributed to his demise. It didn’t help when the oilpatch threatened to seize up. Nor did Kenney’s hubristic, my-way-or-the-highway brand of leadership win over his caucus foes. But it cannot be denied that Kenney was a classic conservative through and through. He slashed corporate taxes, wrestled runaway spending to the mat and balanced the provincial budget for the first time in 14 years. None of that mattered to the right-wing purists who constitute nearly half of his party.
In many ways, the travails of the CPC mirror what’s happened in Alberta. It was created to reunite conservatives who’d stuck by the old federal Progressive Conservative party with the ones who left it to form the Reform-Alliance. While that coalition held during the leadership of Stephen Harper, it is increasingly coming unglued. When Conservative MPs voted 73 to 45 in February to turf O’Toole as their leader, it wasn’t only because he’d failed to win last year’s federal election. In the eyes of that majority, he wasn’t true-blue enough and had sacrificed supposedly sacred conservative principles by flip-flopping on issues.
But that hasn’t ended the party’s ideological and philosophical discord. The gulf between the two top contenders to replace him, Pierre Poilievre and Jean Charest, is more evidence of the party’s nagging identity crisis. Not only do Poilievre and Charest vehemently disagree on key issues, such as climate change, they make no effort to conceal the contempt in which they hold each other.
Whether or not voters in this country would ever mark an X beside any conservative candidate’s name, they should find these trends alarming. The left and right extremes of our political spectrum are more pronounced than ever. The common ground — the middle ground — on which people of open minds and good-will can stand together has shrunk. And it will shrink even more if the conservative movement in this country is hijacked by an extreme right wing. There is a struggle going on for the heart of Canadian conservatism and how it ends will determine this country’s political future.